Lee Surrenders to Grant at Appomattox

It was Palm Sunday, and the war was over before lunch. On the morning of April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia — starving, outnumbered, and cut off — made one last attempt to break through the Union lines near the Virginia village of Appomattox Court House. When Federal infantry appeared behind the Union cavalry, Lee saw there was no way out. He sent word to Ulysses S. Grant: he was ready to talk.

The two generals met at about one o'clock in the front parlor of the home of Wilmer McLean. They made an odd pair. Lee, who had known Grant slightly in the Mexican War, arrived in full dress uniform, sash and ceremonial sword. Grant came straight from the field in a muddy field uniform. After some awkward small talk about old times, Lee asked for the terms, and Grant — writing with a carbon-paper copybook — put them down on the spot.

The terms were strikingly generous. Lee's nearly 28,000 officers and men would be paroled and sent home, undisturbed by United States authority so long as they kept their paroles and obeyed the laws where they lived. Officers could keep their sidearms. And the men could keep their horses — Grant's way of making sure they could get a late spring crop in the ground. Lee's starving soldiers would also receive some 25,000 Union rations, so the hungry Confederates could eat before beginning the long walk home.

It could have gone very differently. One of Lee's subordinates had urged him to scatter the army and fight on as guerrillas. Lee refused, believing it would only bring more suffering on the people of the South. Instead of a bitter, endless insurgency, the war would end at a table.

Three days later, on April 12, the Army of Northern Virginia formally stacked its arms before Union troops — Confederate Major General John B. Gordon leading his men past Union Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain. More surrenders followed across the South, in North Carolina, Alabama, and finally Louisiana by June. The four-year war that had cost more than 600,000 American lives was effectively over.

Why it matters: Appomattox was not just a military ending but a moral choice. Grant's leniency and Lee's refusal of guerrilla war set a tone — imperfect, and soon tested by Lincoln's assassination five days later — that the country would be reunited rather than endlessly punished.

Photo: Hal Jespersen, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).